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Should Gordon be worried about the eulogies to Blair

Tucked away in the detail of yesterday’s YouGov poll were the responses to the question “Who would make the best Prime Minister”? When the options were Blair, Cameron and Campbell 79% of Labour voters said Tony with just one per cent naming Cameron

But when the same question was asked with Gordon Brown substituted for Tony Blair the proportion of Labour voters going for Brown dropped to 71% with 6% naming Cameron.

The same effect was seen with the forced choice question - “would you prefer to see after the next election, a Conservative Government led by Cameron or a Labour Government led by Brown/Blair”. A total of 90% Labour supporters went with the Blair-led option but this number dropped to 79% when Brown’s name was substituted.

For in spite of everything there appears to be a significant group of voters who went with Labour because of Tony and might fall away when he goes.

All of this could be magnified in the coming months as we get nearer to the Blair departure. For we are already starting to see the eulogies to Tony Blair - one of which, by Matthew Parris, appears in the Times this morning. Under the heading “I’m no fan of the man, but I do love Blair’s Britain” Parris goes on to record the good things that have happened to British society in the past nine years.

Parris writes: “..And there has been, as gradual as it is signal and (I hope) permanent, a steady reduction in the level of general censoriousness in public life. In its way this is every bit as health-giving as a reduction in the volume of noxious gases in the atmosphere, and it is clear to me that Mr Blair himself has helped to lead it. Whether or not he “does” God (as Alastair Campbell put it), this Prime Minister does not do preaching, moralising or finger-wagging. The news media, even the red-top tabloids, have followed suit. Look at the sympathetic way the victims of the Suffolk murders have been treated by the press and broadcasters in recent weeks…..In democratic politics it is no small thing to catch a changed wind early, to let it fill your sails, and to help steer the spirit of a nation into different waters. This Mr Blair has done with a deftness, with a sensitivity to national mood that has been unequalled by any British politician I can remember. And the result has been good. That at least is a legacy of which he should be proud.”

For those of us who like predicting General Elections I fear that 2007 is going to be a frustrating year. How will Labour be viewed when the man who made it OK for many in the middle classes to support the party finally steps down? Will the dramatic changes that a likely Brown government invigorate the party?

I find this hard to call. The polling numbers don’t look good for Gordon but he will surely be perceived very differently when it is Sarah and him posing on the staircase of Number 10 and not the Blairs?

Mike Smithson

But it’s 45-32 on the Cameron-Brown forced choice

This month’s YouGov poll in the Daily Telegraph shows very little movement on a month ago. These are the shares - CON 37% (nc): LAB 33% (+1): LD 17% (+1). So the overall Tory lead is down a point with Labour and the Lib Dems both putting on a point.

But the named leader measure that YouGov uses - a forced choice asking “would you prefer to see after the next election, a Conservative Government led by Cameron or a Labour Government led by Brown” - shows a widening gap. These are the responses to that question for the past year:-

NOV 2005 CON 37: LAB 46 (LAB +9)
FEB 2006 CON 37: LAB 43 (LAB +6)
JUN 2006 CON 44: LAB 38 (CON +6)
AUG 2006 CON 43: LAB 36 (CON +7)
OCT 2006 CON 46: LAB 33 (CON +13)
NOV 2006 CON 43: LAB 34 (CON +9)
DEC 2006 CON 45: LAB 32 (CON +13)

So on this measure there has been a fall back in the Brown recovery that we saw in November. This question, of course, is forced and is not about voting intention but the huge falling off in support for a Labour Government under Brown in barely ten months should be worrying for the party. The Chancellor needs better numbers when questions like this are asked.

But there’s is a glimmer of good news for Gordon in another question - when asked, however, who would make “the best PM” respondents in the survey went Cameron 28%: Brown 27%: Campbell 6%..

Will there be a Brown bounce when he eventually takes over - and in what direction will it go? If these and other poll findings are right then the best thing that can happen to Cameron’s Conservatives is for the Chancellor to take over from Blair. All hypothetical of course - but Brown needs better numbers to ease the jitters in his party.

UPDATE - New Mori Poll
The Ipsos-Mori poll for December is now up on the firm’s website and shows, with changes on last month CON 37 (+2): LAB 36 (+3): LD 18 (-2).

These are based on people saying they are “100% certain to vote” and Mori, as we have discussed at length here before, does not weight by past vote recall in order to ensure a politically balanced sample.

The voting figures are based on the responses of 1,075 “100% certains”. The non-voting question have Gordon Brown with a 42-42 satisfied-dissatisfied rating and Cameron with 28-33. It is not clear from the site what the base is for the non-voting questions.

Mori do not ask a named-leader voting intention question or a forced choice like in the YouGov poll.

As ever because of its sampling methodology I do not attach as much importance to Mori as ICM, Populus or YouGov.

Mike Smithson

Why is less importance attached to the view of Labour voters?

Detailed data from the December ICM and Populus polls shows that the reported shares followed the biggest scaling back of the views of those who said they voted Labour last time since the last election. If this process had not happened then, in spite of all the recent troubles, Blair-Brown’s party would have probably had poll leads.

For in each of the two polls that we have had in December more than half those who answered the “how did you vote last time” question said they had supported Labour at the last election. With both firms this vote recall proportion is the highest figure since May 2005. Normally they find an average of about 44%.

It will be recalled that the actual Labour share at the last General Election was just over 36%. So what the two leading phone pollsters do is adjust their samples, allowing for a level of misremembering, to bring it more in line with the General Election result and these are the figures that we see published. The December 2006 “adjustments” were the biggest I have ever seen.

Understanding what is going on is central for those who like predicting and betting on election outcomes. I recently found this article from ICM, written after the 2001 General Election, which sets out the firm’s rationale for its methodology.

Pollsters hope that by getting the demographic profile of their samples to match the whole population, polls will give an accurate picture of voting intentions. Trouble is the days when all the toffs voted Tory and the flat capped working classes supported Labour have long gone. A demographically representative poll is no longer necessarily politically balanced. Added to which, response rates are low and falling. Some groups within the population are difficult to interview and some don’t want to reveal their voting intentions. But at present the pollsters simply replace refusers with others who share the same demographic profile, ignoring the possibility that, in doing so, it may be easier to find Labour voters…

You would have thought that most people could remember how they voted in the last election. Yet according to one poll conducted just three weeks after the 2001 election only 26% remembered having voted Conservative (7% too low) while 48% said they had voted Labour (6% too high). On the face of it, such polls simply contain too many Labour voters and too few Tories.

So why not use past voting behaviour to ensure the polls are demographically and politically representative? Some say you can’t trust past votes because some people forget how they voted and others align past votes to present intentions, but it’s the only candidate in town. Of course pollsters have to make some allowance for faulty recall, but the indications are that if the pollsters were to target recall votes closer to the outcome last time they will also get more accurate predictions.

I believe that there is a strong case for the ICM-Populus approach which is why I rate their polls ahead of Ipsos-Mori and Communicate Research. If, as happened this month, half your respondents are saying they voted Labour last time then clearly the sample is not balanced.

Latest prices on which party will win most seats at the next General Election are: CON 0.86/1: LAB 1.18/1.

Mike Smithson

Is the “Climate Change” debate giving him the opportunity to shine?

The Labour leadership has appeared such a certainty for so long that we have barely discussed the “events dear boy - events” scenario of who would be in contention if something untoward happened to Gordon Brown or his campaign.

And there’s one figure who has started to pick up support again - David Miliband the young Environment Secretary. As the chart showing best betting prices illustrates there has been a bit of a move to Miliband which is probably linked to a series of recent assured performances on the climate change issue.

As the FT’s, Gideon Rachman, wrote this week there has been a flurry interest in the scientific case on climate change following a long and closely-argued attack in the Sunday Telegraph by Viscount Christopher Monckton, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher – “who like many Thatcherites suspects that global warming is a socialist plot.”

The Monckton article has “become a new sacred text for climate-change sceptics” and has helped keep it on the news agenda. All this has provided an excellent platform for the quiet intellectual approach of Miliband who always seems to be popping up in the media at the moment.

Clearly Miliband is not going to run against Gordon - but in the “what if” scenario he must be a better bet than John Reid.

Mike Smithson

Cameron’s party back at 40% as he demands a post-Blair election

With the Tory leader, David Cameron ratcheting up the pressure on Gordon Brown to call an immediate General Election when he becomes leader there’s some good news for his party in the latest poll.

ICM’s monthly survey for the Guardian - by far the longest polling series in the UK - puts the Tories back at the 40% level that they were last at in August. The shares, with changes on the last ICM survey at the end of November are: CON 40 (+1): LAB 32 (+1): LD 18 (-2).

The reported decline in the LD share means that the leading Commons seat calculators - from Martin Baxter and Anthony Wells - put David Cameron’s party very close to or above the levels required for a Commons majority. The Baxter calculation gives a Tory majority of 26 while Wells shows the party would be a few seats short.

It should be noted that the survey took place in the three days after Tony Blair’s interview with the police in the honours probe and while the row of the arms contract bribery investigation was at full height.

It should also be noted that in recent months, at least, ICM’s methodology has been producing the best figures for the Tories of all the pollsters. The firm has been the pioneer of the technique known as past vote weighting whereby the sample is weighted in accordance with how respondents said they voted in May 2005 allowing for a level of misremembering.

The firm’s formula for dealing with the latter is more favourable to the Tories than Populus which reported last week that the Tory share was down to just 34% - 1% ahead of Labour.

ICM also found a big increase in the number of respondents saying they believed that the Tories will win the next election. In July this was at 19% - this month it is up to 37%. Amongst declared Tory voters two out of three now believe that they are heading for victory.

A question I have not seen ICM put since the General Election was to ask those in the sample what other parties they might support. For Tory voters this came out at Lib Dems 32%: Green 19%: UKIP 14%. With declared Labour voters the figures were Lib Dems 30%: Green 16%: UKIP 9%.

These numbers should further strengthen David Cameron’s position as he seeks to move his party to the centre ground.

Betting latest. Both Labour and the Tories are at 2.45/1 to win Commons majorities at the next election. A hung parliament is favourite at 1.4/1.

Mike Smithson

Best of luck from everyone associated with PBC

For the past twenty months the discussions on PBC have been enriched by the wit, knowledge, and good judgement of Jack W who posted first on March 25th 2005 and has made a staggering 8,091 separate contributions. We had this message from him yesterday.

Jack W says TTFN.

I regret to report that this is something of a valedictory post from moi, at least for now I hope.

Having seen off lifes returning officer a couple of times and safely been returned, it appears like a health by-election has been called and the yellow peril machine is in full cry !! With any luck I’ll repel the medical bar charts, but if the hospital food includes quiche I’m almost certainly done for. My enforced medical absence and r&r will certainly last several months and even many elections hence !!

Without wishing to sound too mawkish I’d like to thank you all on PB who have made my time here so enjoyable. Special gratitude go to Mike and family for all their splendid efforts.

To those who know the true identity behind Jack W and kept a little secret and those many friends on the site who have brightened up my time here with excellent political analysis and not a little humour, I say a hearty and heartfelt thank you.

A simple Scottish saying goes :

“Will ya no come back agin ?”

Faith willing aye and God bless you all.

………………………………..

Signing off …. Jack W. of this parish.

Our thoughts are with Jack and his family this holiday season and nothing would give us greater pleasure than to see that 8,092nd post.

Mike Smithson